DICTATORS may decide the fate of their unhappy subjects but they are pretty poor at gunning down wild game.

That became plain yesterday as the personal cook of Erich Honecker spilled the beans on the way that the East German Communist leader cheated on his hunting expeditions.

Official photographs of Honecker’s catch in the 1970s and 1980s show hundreds of hares arranged in circles or a clutch of proud tyrants inspecting slaughtered stags.

In fact, says the cook, Jurgen Krause, much of the swag was shot in advance and came straight out of the deep freeze. “While Honecker and his guests were wading through the woods, most of the hares had already been caught and strung up by professional hunters. Many had not even been properly defrosted.”

Honecker’s last swag was a red deer shot on November 8 1989, a day before the Berlin Wall crumbled and three weeks after he had been deposed by another committed hunter, Egon Krenz. The East Germans were, however, not the only hunting cheats.

Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, was a vainglorious bear shooter. He was helped by secret agents who injected Valium into pots of honey to slow down the prey.

Polish agents trained a bison for six months to stroll from one side of a forest to another so that it was ready to be shot by Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev. Marksmen were hiding among the bushes to down the bison had Mr Brezhnev have missed. Large stretches of forest land across Eastern Europe, surrounded by electric fencing, were filled with wild boar, foxes and elk made fat and slow by being fed specially imported maize.

The Communist dictators used the expeditions to strike deals away from the hidden microphones of their own security services. The cooks, like Herr Krause, were sworn to secrecy about the origin of the meat served up at the often drunken banquets. “For that reason I was trained not only as a cook, but as a bodyguard,” said Herr Krause, 62, whose memoirs are being serialised in the mass circulation Bild.

Perhaps the most astonishing revelation about the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ life of dictators is how incompetent the military top brass were in handling guns. The retired forester, Guenter Wrost, recalled seeing the Soviet Marshall Yakubowski on the East German hunting estates during the 1970s. Marshall Yakubowski had organised the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Herr Wrost spotted him fiddling around with a loaded hunting rifle in the back of a jeep, and told him to desist. “Sorry,” said the much decorated army chief, “I haven’t held a weapon since 1945 — I don’t really know how they work.”